At age 40, Luis Rodriguez figures he should have enough life experience to deal with the problems of his 20-year-old son, Ramiro. He talks to Ramiro, draws him out about what he’s feeling. He talks to Ramiro’s friends, offering a nonjudgmental ear. He takes the boys to sports events and even helped them start a youth group. But none of it seems to matter. Ramiro is in trouble–gang trouble.
So they crossed the river and moved to “La Colonia,” the Mexican section of Watts. Luis’s father, who was never able to master English, could only find occasional construction or factory work; his mother cleaned houses. Everywhere they went they were treated as outsiders. Luis quickly learned to recognize a phrase that would define their existence in the United States: “This is not your country.”
After school Rodriguez would wait in the college library for his father to finish work. He browsed through the books there, checking indexes for entries under “Mexican,” but he found little to interest him until he happened upon a special shelf near the front of the library. Under the watchful gaze of the librarian, he discovered books like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets–books about the streets that he could relate to.
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One day Rodriguez saw a woman being beaten on the street by a police officer. He tried to stop it. He sees the incident as the turning point in his life. “When I got political, I got dumber,” he says. “Nobody gets involved in a police arrest. But I had changed. It was a matter of honor.”
Shortly after the breakup, Rodriguez began to pursue writing in earnest. He took night classes in creative writing and journalism and in 1980 quit his industrial work to join the East Side Sun, an East LA weekly. For six months he emptied the garbage, swept the floors, wrote stories, and did some photography for $100 a week. Later that year he moved to the San Bernardino Sun and covered the police beat for two years, but he says he alienated his Republican editor by writing from his community’s viewpoint. After being let go there he freelanced and did PR for unions and Latino newspapers. He also organized Latino literary workshops in East LA.
